Microsoft needs end of life counseling: Bring on the death panel

Installing Windows 7 on a vista computer seems about as easy as passing health care. Check out this column from Walt Mossberg And guess what, there is no way to upgrade from Windows XP.
I am now into my second day trying to upgrade my Vaio Vista notebook to the windows 7 release candidate. I moved about a year ago from the PC to the MAC. Although it has not been an easy transition it has been well worth it. My reasons for doing this can be read on my post 12 steps program to go from the PC to the MAC. Some of my experiences can be heard on a podcast interview on MacCast. So why am I trying to upgrade my Vista computer? Well, it turns out I have a number of things on the computer that are embedded in programs that do not run on the mac. I have quicken and while there is a version on the mac, it is not compatible with its sister program on the PC (kudos to Intuit!). I use Photo Shop Elements on the PC particularly for organizing my photos. The version on the Mac does not have the organizer. I now use iPhoto but it works in a very different way. I sometimes need to go back to Photo Shop Elements to figure out the tagging on my very old scanned photos. I used Family Tree Maker for my genealogy and but it also does not run on the Mac and I want to be able to make sure I have all the info converted. But most importantly, my home AV system and lighting system can only be programed with a PC. However, I cannot work with Vista it drives me crazy and I did not want to downgrade to Windows XP. So my hope was to use Windows 7 to finally get access real access to my Vaio.

I am on my second day (probably three hours of my actual time). I had to upgrade and correct several problems with the Vista installation before it would agree to do the upgrade. That took a day. Now it is actually doing the upgrade.

Well, it is the next morning and Windows 7 is actually running. I just tried to remove a program that is not compatible with Windows 7 and the systems crashed and is shutting down.
Just got it running with remote connection on my Mac which I could never get done with Vista. I can see it is a lot faster than Vista. It will probably be successful for new computers but the upgrade process is very ugly.

Next month I will upgrade my Mac to SnowLeopard and I would guess it will take less than an hour and work the first time.